Tales Retold

“Maleficent” and “A Million Ways to Die in the West.”

Angelina Jolie and Elle Fanning in the latest version of the Sleeping Beauty story.

Illustration by Victor Melamed

For centuries, the myth of Sleeping Beauty has tossed and turned. In Charles Perrault’s version of 1697, the happy ending was not an ending at all; it led to an aftermath flavored with serial cannibalism, writhing vipers, and slit throats. Italo Calvino, collecting Italian folktales, dug up an old Calabrian variant in which the prince does not wake the heroine but rapes and impregnates her in her sleep. For some reason, none of this made it into the Disney film of 1959.

As for the fairy villain, Perrault did not name her; nor did the Brothers Grimm, in “Little Briar-Rose,” their retelling of 1812. Disney, however, which never lost money by spelling things out, called her Maleficent: something of a giveaway, you might think, although the other characters seemed taken aback when she rolled up to the christening of the princess and started raging about spinning wheels and death, instead of handing over a Tiffany feeding spoon and a couple of bibs from Bonpoint. No surprise, then, that, like the Queen in “Snow White,” or Cruella De Vil in “101 Dalmatians,” she commandeered the story. But does she need a movie to herself?

There is only one reason to see “Maleficent,” but it is a very good reason indeed, and that is Angelina Jolie. She takes the title role and plays with it—teasing out every strand of sadism, defiance, and ennui, and perhaps reflecting on what further strands might have been available, within a claw’s reach, were this not another Disney production. Her speech is brisk and British, with overtones of Kristin Scott Thomas, and the icy abruptness with which she says, “Oh,” upon learning of the baby’s birth would not have disgraced the pages of Evelyn Waugh. On her back is a pair of enormous wings; finding them plucked off one morning, she gives an overwhelming howl of loss and grief. More resilient are the curving horns on her head; at the screening I attended, the audience was offered the plastic equivalent, which I regretfully declined, so as not to block the view of the person behind me. And they work only when teamed with satanically red lipstick, which I didn’t have on me at the time. Plus, you need the cheekbones.

Jolie has many co-stars. Sam Riley is her sidekick, who can adopt the form of a dragon, a raven, or a wolf; Sharlto Copley is her nemesis, the king of a neighboring land; and the part of Sleeping Beauty, never easy, goes to Elle Fanning, whose expression, tirelessly seraphic, suggests that she is raising funds in a charity smile-a-thon. The contributor who matters most, though, is Rick Baker. He was the presiding genius of movie makeup in pre-digital days, winning seven Oscars, and anybody who saw Michael Jackson groove with the undead in “Thriller” was looking at Baker’s handiwork. Jolie’s cheekbones, which I thought were designed by Ferrari or Lockheed, turn out to be Baker’s invention, and you feel them slicing through the softness of the film. Try stroking Maleficent on the face, and you’d wind up with bloody fingers. Children will not forget her in a hurry.

Would that the rest of the movie followed suit. The rule is that Disney cartoons are mettlesome and taut, whereas Disney live-action projects are a meandering mess; who would honestly choose “Oz the Great and Powerful” over “Tangled” or “Frozen”? The director of “Maleficent” is Robert Stromberg, and the screenplay is by Linda Woolverton, who wrought her narrative magic on “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King”; but, having started the new movie at a trot, they reach the baptismal curse and come to a juddering halt. The problem, as with so many fairy tales, is the weight of time. If you are Perrault, or the Grimms, you merely say, “Years passed,” and leap to the next enchanted event, but “Maleficent” takes the risky decision to hang around for those years, waiting for the princess to grow up, and padding out numerous scenes with the doings of farcical fairies. The music, by James Newton Howard, gives little propulsion, but then any composer is going to suffer next to Tchaikovsky, whose ballet score was so unblushingly pinched by Disney, in 1959. The result was orchestra-powered, aided by the heraldic simplicity of the animation. The design of the new movie, by contrast, has that over-busy, cram-every-corner relentlessness that infected Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland,” in 2010, and Maleficent’s forest lair, which should be a haven of ominous quietude, is a pulsating traffic jam of tree monsters and trolls. Again, it is Jolie who saves the day, and brings on the night. There are wonderful shots of her emerald eyes, gazing at the princess from the shadows, all the creepier for being so calm.

But why is she gazing? What has the movie done to her, and to the armored gleam of her wickedness? The news is bleak: Maleficent, far from being arrested for stalking a minor, begins to think better of her plans. Why, she even takes a fancy to the noble little brat! She might as well go the whole hog and change her name to Benevolent. Such a transformation would, of course, be wholly in line with the tender niceties on which, unlike the Brothers Grimm, we pride ourselves, and “Maleficent” is hardly alone in its revisionist urge. I would wager that it sprang from a night at the theatre, when a row of movie executives noted the crowds flocking to “Wicked”—a musical about the good heart that beat inside the bad witch, from “The Wizard of Oz”—and dreamed of similar gold. Where this maddened hunt for backstories will lead, I dread to think. Will the sisters in Disney’s latest version of “Cinderella,” already pencilled in for next year, stay ugly to the end? Will the wolf help the three little pigs to build a communal living space, eco-friendly and resistant to both huffs and puffs? The notion that evil can and should be redeemed, not punished, smacks of moral progress; but kids, who like their villains to be vanquished, may have other ideas.

Set in Arizona, in 1882, “A Million Ways to Die in the West” stars Seth MacFarlane as Albert Stark. Albert is a poor sheep farmer with a yellow belly and limited prospects, so it’s no surprise when his sweetheart Louise (Amanda Seyfried) leaves him for Foy (Neil Patrick Harris), a dandy with cash and a rococo mustache. Albert has a best friend, Edward (Giovanni Ribisi), a God-fearing type who is betrothed to a prostitute named Ruth (Sarah Silverman). Also present are Liam Neeson, as a black-hearted gunslinger called Clinch, and Charlize Theron, who plays Anna, his long-suffering wife. So, the cast is in fine shape; the grandeur of the landscapes is well caught by the cinematographer, Michael Barrett, with many a nod to John Ford; and the soundtrack, by Joel McNeely, kicks off with a big, generous pastiche of an old-school Western theme. As it fades, at the end of the opening credits, the scene is set.

Then the film happens. Here are some of the subjects with which it grapples: death by flatulence, the pains of anal sex (“I’m going to rest my asshole”), and a hatful of diarrhea. Do you notice a common theme? Picture an entire movie spawned by the campfire scene from “Blazing Saddles,” and you’re almost there. All this will speak to your soul, no doubt, if you are a twelve-year-old boy who believes the bathroom to be the funniest place on earth, but what about the rest of us? Fear not, for MacFarlane—who co-wrote and co-produced the film, as well as starring in it—has joys in store for those of more cultivated tastes. There are gags about retarded sheep, Chinese immigrants, the halitosis that follows a blow job, and the precise appearance of the pudenda after a spell in the sex trade. As is his wont, MacFarlane is daring us to be disgusted; and, should we flinch, his movie will mock us for being prim—the worst of all crimes, in his scabrous world. But what if we’re just bored?

Stuck in the foul mire are a few good scenes. I liked the idea that Edward and Ruth are chaste with each other, saving themselves for marriage, even while she is servicing fifteen clients a day; the joke keeps coming back, however, growing less amusing with each repeat. That’s the thing about running gags: eventually, they stagger and collapse. The same goes for the historical observations—the fact that nobody smiled in nineteenth-century photographs, or Anna’s admission that she was a child bride because “I just didn’t want to end up like one of those fifteen-year-old spinsters.” Here we approach the nub of MacFarlane’s argument: his bold contention that, in Anna’s words, “the West fucking sucks,” with its army of diseases, its wretched life expectancy, and what Albert calls its “general depressing awfulness.” Yet what is most depressing about the film is not the low strike rate of its zingers, or what Freudians will diagnose as its anal fixation, so typical of the infant mind, but the comic complacency. Albert may be spineless, but that is nothing new; it is more than sixty years since Bob Hope put a coward among the cowboys, in “The Paleface.” And does Seth MacFarlane think that he is the first to notice how grim conditions were in the great drive westward, that he alone can puncture the myth of that adventure, or that his gang of ne’er-do-wells is the wildest bunch of all? Tell it to Sam Peckinpah. ♦

Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”